A winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Engineering (Leverhulme Trust), the Lord Kelvin Medal (Royal Society of Edinburgh), and a MacRobert Award (Royal Academy of Engineering) finalist, he was previously Weir Professor of Thermodynamics & Fluid Mechanics, and Head of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department, at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Jason Reese studied at Imperial College London, graduating in Physics in 1988.

[6] After his PhD, Reese moved into engineering and was a postdoctoral researcher at Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Cambridge.

In 2013 he was appointed to the Regius Professorship at the University of Edinburgh,[7] the ninth incumbent of this position since it was established by Queen Victoria in 1868.

He was also involved in the industrial application of fluid mechanics: he was part of the team that founded Brinker Technology Ltd in 2002 to commercialise a novel leak detection and sealing system for oil/gas pipelines and wellheads, and water mains pipes.